


Loose Ends

by hit_the_books



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Betaed, Hurt Castiel, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prompt Fic, Sam Is So Done, Sam Ships It, Sam saves the day, Season/Series 12, Team Free Will, Torture, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-25 00:31:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9794432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hit_the_books/pseuds/hit_the_books
Summary: Toni comes back to Lebanon to finish what she started. No matter what the cost.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cenotaphy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cenotaphy/gifts).



> This fic is a prize for cenotaphy, who came first place in a fanfic review game run by [/r/fandomnatural](https://www.reddit.com/r/fandomnatural/comments/5kauy8/merry_christmas_happy_holidays_join_us_for_our/), and won the opportunity to prompt me for a fic.
> 
> Thanks to [Fic_me_senseless](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fic_me_senseless) for being my beta reader on this C:

Pie box in hand, Sam walked down the stairs into the Bunker proper, having walked into town to get pie. Dean had made a fuss of him not driving in, but it was only just over a mile and Sam had wanted to stretch his legs—they’d been chasing themselves in circles all day, looking for traces of Kelly, and Sam had been getting a little stir crazy.

The Bunker was eerily silent, and the further Sam walked in, the more the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He put the pie box down on the stairs and pulled out his handgun from the back of his jeans.

Gun raised, Sam stepped down the stairs as quietly as he could. There was no one by the map table. No one further in at the tables by the start of the library. For a brief fleeting moment he thought that maybe Dean and Cas had just maybe finally stopped dancing around and were in Dean’s room; that the spilled books on the floor were from some passionate rendezvous.

Seeing no one else in the main communal areas of the Bunker, and the Impala in the garage, Sam stalked on through, praying that he was about to hear the sound of Cas and Dean becoming something more to each other. He laughed inside at the idea that he was hopeful his brother was having sex rather than what he increasingly knew had probably happened.

The bedrooms were silent and cold, Dean’s empty and the bed still made from the previous night. Heading back to the library, Sam booted up his own laptop and checked out the photos from surveillance cameras he’d installed after he was last taken.

He gritted his teeth when a familiar face popped up.

***

Cas cried out again, weakened arms pressing down too much into the silver cuffs on his wrists. Glancing over at Cas, Dean wished he could rip away his own bonds and help the angel—he’d never seen the Enochian markings on Castiel’s cuffs arranged as they were, but it was clearly worse than anything they’d dreamed up to hold Crowley, Cas and Lucifer. The cuffs hurt every time they pressed too much into Castiel’s skin.

Blood dripped down Castiel’s forehead from a metal device secured to his skull with bolts. The silver framework was similar to what Crowley had used when they’d tried to confront Gadreel during his possession of Sam. Dean hadn’t liked the thing then and he still didn’t like it. The thick silver needles pushed deep into Castiel’s skull made the angel scream in ways Dean had never heard before, and never wanted to hear again. The screams had only stopped because Toni had walked off to take a call.

Dean wanted to stop this, wanted to end their torture, but on his terms, not what Toni Bevell, evil bitch incarnate, wanted. She was like a broken record, asking over and over about other hunters; the apocalypse; Leviathan; Heaven and Hell… Over and over, knife cutting deeper and deeper. Despite the wounds Cas had, Dean’s were worse and the hunter knew this on some vague level, but he didn’t want to think about it, because his pain was nowhere near as bad.

He just wanted to think about escape, of rescue and finally showing Toni why she needed to leave them the fuck alone. The longer they were in yet another dilapidated basement, the less sure Dean was that he and Cas were getting out. What if Sam couldn’t find them? Didn’t know who had taken them? Even though Dean knew, deep down, that Sam probably would find them—the pain he felt kept blocking out all reason.

“C-Cas?” Dean croaked out. “We’re getting out of here. I promise. We’ll get out of here. So you just hang in there. You just hang in.”

All Cas replied with was a dazed mumble that made tears well up in Dean’s eyes again. Booted feet crept down the basement stairs and Toni smiled as she approached Cas and Dean once more.

“Sorry about that. I had to take that call. Now, where were we?” the Brit asked, voice far too Downton Abbey for its own good. Toni went over to a long, wooden table and ran her fingers over the instruments that covered the table’s pockmarked surface.

“Hmm, yes, this will do,” Toni mumbled to herself, reaching out for something that Dean couldn’t see. She turned and kept her new tool hidden behind her back as she walked up to Dean.

“You know,” Toni started, hands behind her back, “that if you just tell me what I want to know that this will all stop. The deal hasn’t changed since we danced to this tune the last time, dear Dean. So why not be a good boy and,” Toni drew out a knife with runes etched into the blade, “tell me what I want to know.”

Before Dean was given the chance to answer, Toni pressed the blade against Dean’s left cheek. A hot lance of pain sliced through Dean’s skin and muscle. He could feel blood spilling forth from the wound that had been cut with the merest touch from that blade, and he didn’t want to think about the kind of damage it might do if Toni put her back into it. Sucking in a lungful of air as he fought not to cry out, Dean wondered how the hell Toni had managed to make it stateside again, after her dismissal by Mitch.

“How’d you…” Dean spoke through the pain, “manage to… make it back… so quick?” He winced as the knife slid along his cheek again and stopped. “I thought… you were in… the doghouse?”

The knife left Dean’s cheek and Toni twirled on the spot, opening her arms up and smiling. There was a manic gleam in her eyes and Dean finally realized that Toni was there off book and off pretty much everything else. “I just couldn’t leave this loose end. You know, like a thread on your favorite jacket and you just want it gone, perfect and smooth. Yes, I don’t like loose ends.” She pointed the knife at Dean, intent clear. “Tell me everything, Dean.”

***

Toni was getting sloppy, from what Sam could tell. The Range Rover she’d had Dean and Cas dragged into unconscious had gone past half a dozen traffic cams before stopping off at some abandoned farmstead a mere twenty miles from the Bunker. Though Sam didn’t put it past Toni staying close so she could pick Sam up and have a full-set. He didn’t know how Toni had been allowed to return, Mitch had seemed pretty pissed at her, but Sam knew what he had to do.

***

“There’s nothing to… Christ!” Dean yelled, knowing that had Cas not had his head turned into a pincushion he would have reprimanded him for cursing. Toni slid her cruel knife across Dean’s exposed stomach and Dean didn’t need to look down to see the blood that was flowing from him.

He’d tried to reason, tried, but Toni just wasn’t buying it. It was like no matter how much he went over the events of the apocalypse or Bobby’s death, she just couldn’t get it into her head that the great hunting network she’d imagined in some fever dream with the rest of the BMoL—she couldn’t seem to get that there wasn’t some super secret hunter club with members running all over the country. And Dean was sure as fuck not gonna tell her about the few allies they’d made since Garth had become a werewolf.

Heck there was no way in hell that Dean was going to tell Toni that Garth was a goddamn werewolf living in a werewolf community. And he prayed that this kind of crazy didn’t know about people like Missouri Moseley. Yes he had been tortured worse in Hell, but no one was going to break him.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” Cas screamed as Toni suddenly dropped the runed knife, stepped over to Cas and pressed a silver needle deeper into the angel’s skull.

Not even if they reduced his best friend, his… Not even if they killed Cas. But even as Dean thought about that, he realized that he had his limits and they weren’t expendable. Still, he didn’t have to speak the truth, didn’t have to give Toni what she really wanted. He could lie and send her to some far flung corner and figure out what to do, maybe see if Sam turned up.

“Alright! Alright!” Dean yelled and bowed his head, hiding his eyes. “I’ll fucking tell you everything. Just… just stop hurting Cas, dammit.”

“I knew you could be reasoned with,” Toni replied, words mocking the very idea of reasoning with someone.

Hanging from his wrists like he was, it was clear to Dean that what he’d experienced the first time round from Toni had merely been a taster. Something had come unhinged inside of the woman since then and helped her true cruel streak to bloom, and bloody anything it touched.

Toni stepped in front of Dean and cradled his right cheek in a faux act of tenderness. She was wearing supple, black leather gloves. Swallowing, Dean kept his gaze averted. “After the Roadhouse went boom… things got a little harder. Like I said, Bobby kept everyone talking before he died and he’d worked with a pal to set up… this… dark web thing that hunters could use to communicate.

“Now, the main server was kept on site in Bobby’s house… he had this panic room in the basement. Nothing could get in or out… perfect place for this sorta thing. Anyways… when the house blew up, the panic room stayed intact under all of that.

“And that means that server is just sitting there… waiting for someone to, y’know liberate it. I mean… the site had other servers elsewhere, keeping things together, but… I don’t know where those ones were. I kinda lost track of it all after Purgatory, but there should be information on there you could use. I remember the original, uh, admin details. Could write them down for you?”

Toni stood back and snorted. “How about you just tell me the _details_ and we’ll see from there.”

Of course there never been any such dark web thing at Bobby’s, but it had been something Charlie had talked about before. The memory of his friend made Dean clench his jaw, but he lifted his gaze up enough to watch Toni as she pulled out her cell to make a note of Dean’s lie.

“So…” Toni prompted.

“Right… uh, username is “colt”, but with a zero for the o. And uh… the password’s—”

Wood snapped and cracked overhead and Sam half jumped down the stairs to the basement. Toni twirled round in surprise and went for a knife on her table, but she was too slow. Fist coming out of nowhere, Sam punched Toni unconscious and she crumpled to the floor.

“Took your time,” Dean groused, but he gave Sam a weary thankful smile.

“Yeah, obviously.” Sam smiled back, the look in his eyes one of worry. He pulled out cable ties from his jacket and secured an unconscious Toni, hands working roughly.

When Sam found the keys to the shackles on Dean and Cas, Dean shook his head when Sam approached him. “Help Cas first,” Dean said, even though all feeling had gone from his arms and hands.

***

It had been hard to not kill Toni, but Sam had called Mitch and told him to come “take out your trash”. Cas had taken over a day to speak again, grace slowly healing his wounds. Dean had made do with Sam tidying him up—though he had to admit his brother had done a good job sewing up his face, so it didn’t look like he’d have too much of a scar.

“Dean?” Cas asked hoarsely. The three of them were sat in a makeshift living room that had been formed in one of the Bunker’s bedrooms. Dean and Cas on a couch, Sam in an armchair. A second hand flat screen was showing some Cowboys game, but Dean didn’t care. Dean was in sweats and an old band tee, Cas similarly dressed in stuff he’d borrowed from Dean. An empty pie box and several empty beer bottles were crowded on a small coffee table in front of them.

“Yeah?” Dean asked and realized his right hand had been stroking the back of Castiel’s neck. He stilled his hand and then Cas leaned into his touch.

“Mmmm, feels nice,” Cas stated. Starting to stroke the angel’s neck again, Dean felt his stomach flip a little.

There was snort from Sam and he exchanged a look with Dean over Castiel’s head. “Finally,” Sam mouthed.

A blush rose to Dean’s cheeks, but he didn’t deny what Sam had implied. Cas hummed and pressed in closer against Dean. Once they’d healed up some more, then he and Cas would talk.

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments appreciated.
> 
> Find me on Tumblr at [dreamsfromthebunker](http://dreamsfromthebunker.tumblr.com/).


End file.
